Scottish primary schools to lose specialist teachers

A selection of primary schools in Perth and Kinross in Scotland are set to lose specialist teachers following changes to the education system.

According to the Daily Record, around 16 of the region’s school will be affected and will no longer have visiting expressive arts or physical education teachers this August.

The move affects the teaching of subjects such as music, art, drama and sports, and will see only 25 of specialist visiting teachers remain within the council to be allocated to primary schools.

At the moment, schools have a system called Reduced Class Contact Time (RCCT).

This means that a full-time teacher has 25 hours a week of time to directly teach their class, leaving two hours a week where the teacher is not in the classroom.

To fill this time, schools have visiting expressive arts and PE specialists to take over classes instead.

However, Perth and Kinross Council agreed to restructure RCCT at the beginning of the year, which involved “redeploying” a number of these specialist teachers.

A briefing note sent to councillors said primary school teachers should be able to teach these subjects in the specialist teachers’ place, and added: “A new model for the delivery of RCCT has been created. Class teachers will be responsible for delivering all PE and expressive arts in more schools.

“Over the last year, specialist teachers of expressive arts and PE have been offered the opportunity to retain their posts as they are, to retrain as class teachers, or to join a secondary school as a subject specialist.”

The document added: “Some schools will no longer have visiting specialist teachers, and will, therefore, have the flexibility to recruit their own teaching staff, and to deliver RCCT in a way that suits their context.”